In recent years, the installation of drive recorders in vehicles is increasing, especially in business vehicles such as taxis or trucks. Such a drive recorder is a device that records, pictures, video, and running data of the vehicle before and after the occurrence of a vehicle accident, or before, during and after the immediate acceleration and deceleration that typically occur during an accident.
For example, the drive recorder described in JP-A-2006-69434 determines whether dangerous driving has occurred based on the output from sensors such as a speed sensor, an acceleration sensor, a collision detection sensor, and/or a car distance sensor. When such dangerous driving is detected, the drive recorder outputs an audible warning from a sound output device and saves information related to the dangerous driving in a built-in memory as information of a driver specified by an IC card.
Subsequently, the necessity of driver training can be determined by reading and analyzing the data recorded in the built-in memory or the IC card of the drive recorder.
When dangerous driving leading to an accident occurs when road conditions are poor, such as during the crossing of an intersection in poor visibility conditions or while maneuvering around a sharp curve in a road, a similar dangerous driving situation or condition may occur again in the same location.
The conventional drive recorder records information related to dangerous driving, but the recorded information is typically used only to determine whether the driver drives safely once the driver has finished driving the vehicle. In other words, the conventional drive recorder does not aid a driver to drive a vehicle more safely while the vehicle is being driven based on the recorded information.